Archive » August 10, 2007

 

What Do You Think?

 

In early 2005 the Santa Barbara County Planning and Development Department (P&D) had satisfied the requirement of the 2003-2008 State Housing Mandate by seeking out the community members to help identify a few parcels in the county to be rezoned for affordable housing. After taking into account existing second-unit residences, farm worker housing and other existing housing inventories, it was determined by P&D that, to satisfy the mandate, Santa Ynez Valley needed to rezone property to accommodate 60 affordable units while the rest of the county needed to rezone land parcels to accommodate another approximately 1,000 units. The work had been completed by the county and the community members to satisfy this so-called State Mandate. Mission accomplished – or so we thought.

 

Here we are two-and-a-half years and millions of dollars later. The county, led by the Board of Supervisors (BOS) and Chief Executive Officer Mike Brown, has found the need to drag this process on while they now study thousands and thousands of potential sites to meet this same State Mandate. In fact, at a BOS meeting a few weeks ago, Chairman Brooks Firestone gave the rest of the board and county staff an animated lecture on the consequences of defying the State Mandate. He stated that Santa Barbara County had been assigned 17,000 units and that was the number staff should be focusing on. He went on to direct county attorney Shane Stark to dig up and report back anything he could find on how the people of the county would be punished if they defied the State Mandate. However, he failed to make a like request to bring back any instances in which other counties and municipalities had successfully satisfied the State Mandate by using the same methods we used two-and-a-half years ago to get to 60 units in the Valley and the additional 1,000 units county-wide. This report on the “consequences of defiance” has now been completed and personally sent by Supervisor Firestone to many community leaders, including myself. The report focuses only on one distorted side of the issue and is, in my opinion, nothing more than an instrument of intimidation and manipulation.

 

I think the county leadership is using this farce called the State Housing Mandate as a “magic carpet ride” to justify the building of thousands and thousands of new high density housing units such as the 7,500 homes in the new town of North Hills (just north of Los Alamos) which proposed to rezone hundreds of acres of agricultural lands. Of equal or more concern is what other surprises are in store for the Santa Ynez Valley and the other surrounding areas. I think this is fast-track, high-density development at the expense of the precious agricultural lands that we desperately need to stay economically vital and survive. These lands will disappear forever to be replaced with miles and miles of thoughtless and greedy pavement and concrete – something like what happened in the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s and ’60s and what we currently see happening in Ventura County.

 

A copy of the DVD from the Board of Supervisors Meeting, held May 22 and referenced in this article, may be obtained by calling GVTV Channel 20 at 568-3420.